XIXFinn slumped to the ground to ease the burning pain in his knee. Before him, stretching from horizon to horizon, lay the great machine. Where once there had been a city of shining wheels and smoking chimneys and roaring fires, there was now a mountain range of rubble. Mangled, twisted mounds of machinery rose in rusting piles over the broken and crumbling walls. The gusting wind moaned through stray wires, a chorus of haunting voices.
Here and there, by some miracle, a remnant of the former machine stood intact. A single stone tower festooned with cables, like a metallic maypole. A wheel from one of the beam-engines, rusted into immobility, frozen mid-action. A smokestack with its walls of curved, shining stone. But these fragments only emphasized how complete the destruction of Engn w
